Praise for new laws to protect children

I come today not to launch rocket-powered grenades at our leaders, but to praise them.

No really. I do.

Arizona legislators may not have been able to bring themselves to turn away gifts this year or to boost disclosure requirements so that we actually know what sort of goodies they're getting and from whom. They may not have plugged a rather handy loophole in the law that allows their supporters to donate to their campaigns under cover of anonymity, but they did, at least, do something for children in desperate need of rescue. For kids today who are suffering as Jhessye did and Janie and even baby Josephine.

The Legislature passed several bills aimed at improving their chances, and that is no small thing.

"I believe these interventions truly move the needle, but this isn't all that we need to do," Department of Economic Security Director Clarence Carter told me recently. "We are going to have to constantly fix, add, remove, tweak to keep making the system better, every single minute."

Carter has spent his first year in Arizona basically blowing up the Child Protective Services operation -- cleaning out top echelons of CPS leadership, which he calls "very substandard," and eliminating meaningless bureaucratic hoops that do nothing to help children.

"We have had our labor force chasing its own tail and not protecting children. They've been doing what the bureaucracy tells (them) to do," he said.

To the ongoing internal push for improvement, add in several new laws, which came out of last fall's Arizona Child Safety Task Force.

As a result:

All reports of criminal abuse or neglect will soon be handled by trained investigators rather than social workers, people who know what a crime, rather than an opportunity for parenting classes, looks like, in the hope that the next Jhessye Shockley can be saved.

Both Glendale police and CPS were called to Jhessye's house six months before her disappearance last year to investigate a report that the 5-year-old was being abused. Police punted, leaving the case to a CPS worker who interviewed Jhessye and found no evidence of a problem. These days, Glendale police are searching a landfill for Jhessye's body.

CPS investigators will be required to pick up the phone when they are told of prior reports of abuse or neglect in other states, in the hope that the next Janie Buelna can be saved.

Janie was living with her grandmother and two men when CPS was notified she was being abused. The CPS worker was told the grandmother had a history with CPS in Las Vegas. Had the worker checked, she would have discovered that grandma lost custody of her own six children in 2004 and served 13 months in prison for attempted child abuse.

Instead, CPS proclaimed Janie safe and walked away. Janie was 23 months old when she died last year, her body covered in scars, her teeth broken and her leg ravaged by an untreated burn.

We will now be able to discover what CPS did or didn't do when a child suffers a "near fatality" -- meaning any serious or critical injury -- due to abuse or neglect, in the hope that we can prevent the next baby Josephine from suffering as she did last year.

Since 2008, the law has required such disclosure, but the blackout curtains went up last year when 4-month-old Josephine turned up with 14 broken bones and a cigarette burn on her arm. This while in the care of a CPS "safety monitor."

CPS said it couldn't answer my questions -- things like what steps the agency took to ensure it was putting the baby into safe hands. Though the emergency-room doctor who treated the child called it a "near-death episode," CPS found a doctor to certify that 14 broken bones and a cigarette burn on an infant didn't qualify as a serious or critical injury.

Under the new law, the treating physician will make that call, we will get to see where CPS went wrong and, more importantly, what the agency is doing to fix it.

Good for the Legislature for doing something to help kids. Of course, it could have done more, and maybe someday we will have state leaders who are committed to a sustained effort to helping children who so desperately need it.

Until then, we took a step forward this year, in memory of two little girls we couldn't save, knowing with a certainty that there are so many more awaiting rescue.